1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a screen control mock-up system for displaying a pseudo operation of a program, and more particularly to a screen control mock-up system for making software design and manufacturing processes efficient by providing a mock-up (model) for displaying simulation operations of software at an intermediate stage from a software design to its manufacturing, before the application software is completed, in order to offer a software system.
2. Description of the Related Art
In a conventional design of application software, a system engineer needs to understand a user's explanation about a system for which the application software is to be provided, to make its basic design satisfy the user system requirements, to actually encode the application software, provide the user with the encoded application, and verify if the provided application runs properly as the user desires. Therefore, if the completed application software does not satisfy the user requirements, it is returned to the system engineer despite the completion of the encoding. As a result, the system engineer must remake the application software from the design stage.
Furthermore, a considerable amount of time is spent before the user is able to verify whether the application software that the user requests from a software house to design, runs as he or she desires, and the user must wait for an actual coding of the application software.
In recent years, a method such as a spiral method or a prototype method has been proposed in consideration of the above described problems. According to such a method, the entire process from a design stage to a manufacturing stage is not performed in a waterfall-like manner, and a system engineer or a software house frequently reports a partway process to the user during the performance of the entire process, and makes the user verify a half-coded program if necessary, in order to overcome the above described problems caused by return after completion of the manufacturing of the application software. With such a method, however, return of the coding may occur each time the software house discusses the application software with the user. Actually, an amount of time required for manufacturing the entire application software cannot significantly be reduced, compared to the case in which the coded software is changed after the completion of the manufacturing.
Additionally, a system engineer who acquires system requirements from a user first draws a screen layout used for executing a transaction routine on paper or by using a word processor. Then, the user designs the transaction routine based on the screen layout made on paper or by using a word processor. If any change is made to the design partway, such a screen layout remains unchanged.
There is another problem in that a considerable amount of time is required to complete a manufacturing process, because it must be started from scratch (without any inheritance) after the design process is completed.